What Have I Been Up To?

As you may have noted my postings have been a bit sporadic of late. It is because I have been designing a Stepper Motor Controller. Good for table top machining and 3D printers. I wrote the main elements of the software about 10 years ago to run a Bridgeport Milling machine. To work with modern computers the design needed a hardware update. So I have been updating the hardware. What is interesting about the design is that each motor has its own microprocessor so if you design a tool that needs 5 axis control or even 8 axis control – no problem. With very minor tweaks to the software all the motors will step along in perfect (as near perfect as you can get digitally) synchronism. As long as your longest step is under 2 billion. That is about 1/2 a mile at our finest step resolution and with steps of .00025 inches (what table top CNC machines typically can do). Just to give you an idea – our smallest step size is about 1 wavelength of yellow light. Now the step accuracy of such table top machines is only good to about 2 wavelengths of yellow light at those step rates so your table top machines will not be carving out mirrors for your amateur telescope needs. But they will make very smooth cuts at those machining rates. And if you want to run a Bridgeport? Well I have a design in mind for higher power stepper motors. Let me know.